


Tenderness

by MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Anal Sex, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 19:55:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15692304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly
Summary: “Grief takes many forms,” Thor says. “If you feel it is a betrayal of his memory—”Steve laughs again. He can almost hear Bucky commenting on it.You banged the god of Thunder? Not bad, Stevie.





	Tenderness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightsaroundyourvanity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightsaroundyourvanity/gifts), [inplayruns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inplayruns/gifts).
  * Inspired by [We Do What We Always Do](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14521308) by [MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly). 



> Right after seeing Infinity War, I wrote [the catharsis I needed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14521308), with Steve, Nat, and Thor getting drunk together. That fic almost went in a different direction, which lightsaroundyourvanity and inplayruns both noticed and pointed out. I was too sad to do it in May. It's August and I'm still pretty sad, but "sad porn" is kind of a personal brand at this point, so I might as well lean in. Here's the Steve/Thor remix.

The death reports roll in for what feels like a century, and Steve should know. He might as well be back under the ice. The numbers climb, things get worse, and he feels nothing. There is no _worse_ anymore.

He had to watch Bucky die. Again.

Dimly, Steve knows he should care about the rest of the world. The universe. He’s trying. That skinny kid who got up after being beaten down, that’s who he needs to be right now. These people—everyone who’s left—that’s who they need him to be. They want to hear him say _we’ll get up_ , _we’ll fight this_. He can scrape out what’s left of his insides and shape it into a rousing speech. _Thanos is just one more bully_ , he’ll tell them. _Things look bad now but we’ll get him in the end!_ Maybe Steve can dress up in a flag and punch out a guy in a purple costume a few dozen times. That’ll get their spirits up.

He hacks out a desperate laugh and drops his head into his hands. He can’t do any of that. He can’t. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed in the Wakandan palace fully dressed, because he doesn’t have the energy to take off his fucking shoes. He’s ice all the way through.

Bucky said his name at the end. He’s remembered it so many times he can’t even be sure it really happened. What had it sounded like? Steve is losing it already, the raspy depth of Bucky’s voice, underused in his resurrected life but as wry as always. That last word, though—the tenor of it—had been something else. Only one syllable, a vanishing breath into the air, but it weighs on Steve. Bucky had reached out to him in the last moment of his life, calling his name out like a plea, and Steve hadn’t been there.

_Plus ça_ fucking _change…_

And just like last time, there’s a war on and no time for his feelings. Except this doesn’t feel much like that war, because back then they’d had the thinnest scrap of a chance in Hell.

His hands are dry. He cried once, right after, from the shock of it. Since then, nothing. It’s too big for tears. But he wipes at his eyes reflexively, because he should be crying, and that’s when he sees the note under the door.

It’s Natasha’s handwriting. He hasn’t seen much of her. Once there were no more injured Wakandans to haul off the battlefield, she kept to herself. They’re all licking their wounds, human and alien alike. Nobody has come up with a plan, because that’s Steve’s job, and he can’t fucking do it.

He goes to Natasha’s room and finds Thor sitting on the bed with her. They have a large bottle of something, and there are more on the floor. They don’t exactly smile at him—good, he wouldn’t be able to return the gesture—but they do pat the bed.

“We’re moving to a different stage of grief,” Natasha says.

“I can’t get drunk,” Steve says, lifting his hands in apology.

“Not with that attitude,” Natasha says, and she’s clearly had a lot. “Shuri made this with superhuman biology in mind. She’s drowning her sorrows in projects. We’re drowning our sorrows the regular way.”

She demonstrates.

Steve can’t think of anything else to do, so he sits on the bed with them, keeping a polite distance. Thor grabs him around the waist and hauls him closer. He must be pretty far gone too, since he lays his head on Steve’s shoulder. His arm doesn’t move from its position around Steve’s waist. It’s like using one of those weighted blankets that twenty-first-century therapists are always recommending, except it’s made of Asgardian god. A permanent hug.

Thor is heavy and warm and drunk. He raises his free hand, the one that’s not clamped onto Steve, and takes a drink from his own bottle of whatever Shuri brewed.

“My brother,” Thor murmurs. “And before that, my best friend and my sister and my father and my mother and my homeland.”

God, it’s so much. Too much. How can he bear it? How can any of them bear it? “I’m sorry,” Steve says, because he is, but it will never be enough.

“I’m drinking to them,” Thor says, as if Steve is slow on the uptake. “Join me.”

Natasha raises her bottle in silent salute, but doesn’t name her own sorrows. Steve wonders what names she might list, and if Bucky’s might be among them, or Sam’s. There are so many to mourn that it feels unbelievably selfish to pick one person.

_Steve_ , Bucky had said, as the life was ebbing from his disintegrating body.

There’s no picking. Steve is sadder about one person than all the rest, and he’s got no goddamn choice about it. He’s always been wired that way and it nearly lost them the war the first time around. There’s no Peggy here to pull him out of the bombed-out bar, because she’s dead too. And that has never stopped hurting, and the way things are going, it never will. Steve takes the bottle out of Thor’s hand and fits his lips to the opening. He pours it down his throat and it burns.

“I saw my brother die before,” Thor says. “Somehow every time I mourn him is worse than the last.”

Steve passes the bottle back and says, “I know.”

“Boys always wanna talk about their feelings,” Natasha mumbles, and then she curls around a pillow at the other end of the massive bed and goes to sleep. Steve leans forward to grab her bottle before it spills, impressed. He hasn’t really slept since it happened. He’s closed his eyes and held his body still in bed, but that’s it. Sometimes it’s the worst part of the day, lying alone in the darkness, and that’s saying something, because he’s spent the past few days clearing the dead from a muddy field.

He takes another drink, and Thor says, “Do you? Want to talk about your feelings? I will honor your wishes on the subject.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” Steve says. But between Thor’s radiant body heat and the fire of the liquor, the ice is beginning to melt, so he adds, “Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead.”

Saying it out loud is excruciating and freeing all at once. The glacier cracks.

“Not that I don’t care about you,” Steve clarifies, and now he knows he’s drunk. “Or Natasha. Or the world.”

“But you loved him,” Thor says. “I know. I’m fifteen hundred years old.”

“He said my name. At the end. He said my name and there was _nothing_ I could do.” Steve’s voice shakes with a sob he hasn’t let out yet. His eyes are wet. “I should have—”

Thor stops him with a kiss. Steve lets it happen for a moment, this thing that’s the only measure of warmth or comfort he’s felt in days. He wasn’t expecting it. Doesn’t know what to do with it. But Thor, fifteen-hundred-year-old Thor, knows exactly what to do, and before long he’s laid Steve flat on the bed and is stroking a hand through his hair. He breaks the kiss. After a second of bewildered blinking from Steve, he drops a kiss on Steve’s forehead.

“I apologize. Perhaps you did not want that.”

“I must really be out of practice if that’s the impression I gave you,” Steve says, and somehow his body produces a rueful laugh. And then he remembers arriving in Wakanda for the first time after Bucky awakened, wanting to kiss Bucky but not knowing where they stood, uncertain if he’d be forcing one more thing on Bucky who’d already endured too much. He’d stood there hesitating until Bucky had slammed into him and half-tackled him to the ground with kisses. _Downed by a one-armed man_ , he’d teased, and with the ease between them and the way his voice made Steve’s heart hammer, it might as well have been 1937. Except back then Steve would never have been able to squeeze Bucky around the waist with both thighs and flip the two of them over. He also wouldn’t have wrestled his lover on the ground in front of the King of Wakanda, so lots of things had changed.

God, T’Challa’s dead, too.

Steve closes his eyes against the tears. It’s futile. “What are we doing?” he asks Thor, barely above a whisper. “Is this a bad idea? I can’t tell anymore.”

“Grief takes many forms,” Thor says. “If you feel it is a betrayal of his memory—”

Steve laughs again. He can almost hear Bucky commenting on it. _You banged the god of Thunder? Not bad, Stevie_. During their first Wakandan reunion, Bucky had been disappointed to learn Steve hadn’t fucked his way through the twenty-first century in Bucky’s absence. _Unpatriotic to keep all this to yourself_ was the phrase he’d used. He’d said _I can’t believe you’ve been out and about all this time and you don’t even have any good stories to tell me_.

So Steve had told him about kissing Natasha, and he’d laughed until there were tears in his eyes. _If she ever kisses you again, don’t fuck it up_ , he’d advised.

It hurts, but it’s good to remember Bucky laughing. And for the first time in days, Steve is sure about something: this isn’t a betrayal. “No, he’d be… proud.”

Thor nods solemnly, as if that’s a totally normal relationship to have with your dead best-friend-slash-lover who was once brainwashed to kill you, and Steve is so overcome with gratitude that he pulls Thor down into another kiss.

Thor is heavy on top of him. The weight is a comfort, and Steve revels in it as they trade drunken kisses back and forth. Thor’s not Bucky, not anything like Bucky, but it’s such a relief to feel anything good. The world isn’t totally devoid of pleasure. He drags his palms over the bristles of Thor’s beard, brushes his thumbs across Thor’s cheeks, and feels wetness.

He should have asked how Thor felt about this. Was Thor betraying… someone? Would Thor wake up tomorrow and regret this? “Are you,” Steve starts, and feels too foolish to end that question with _okay_. He tries again. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

Thor touches the corners of Steve’s eyes, equally wet with tears. It’s a perfect, silent way of making his point. They’re both hurting. Then he runs his fingers through Steve’s hair again and lays his forehead against Steve’s.

“I am not doing it for you,” Thor says, with a slight emphasis on the last two words, and when his voice rumbles like that, it reverberates through Steve’s chest. Thunder. Right. Wow. Thor sounds affronted, or amused, and Steve would figure it out, except Thor pulls his own clothes off and then starts on Steve’s. “I will not think less of you for this,” he promises. “We will still be brothers-in-arms.”

“There’s no way I’d ever think less of you,” Steve says, absolutely sincere. But he can’t help but follow it up with a wry glance at Thor’s naked body. _Less_ really isn’t the word.

Thor laughs, kisses him, and they spend a little time making each other forget. They’ve always been good together in battle, and the same unspoken understanding crackles between them here. At first, it’s slower and gentler than Steve expected, Thor treating him like he’s fragile. No one’s done that in a long time, or maybe it’s that he hasn’t let anyone. Tonight it’s alright. Steve does feel fragile, and he suspects the same of Thor. If the fifteen-hundred-year-old Asgardian god of Thunder is shaken, then surely it’s okay for Steve Rogers from Brooklyn. They give each other permission.

After a while, Steve thinks maybe it’s not so much treating each other like they’re fragile as it is treating each other like they’re precious. There’s not much left of the universe, or rather, there’s the same universe with only half as much life left to rattle around in its vast emptiness. Tenderness is the only way to survive.

Thor asks to be fucked, wordlessly guiding Steve’s hand between his thighs and pressing a bottle of lube into the other. He wonders briefly why and how there was lube in the room, but lets it pass. There are more important matters at hand.

They take their time. Nothing good awaits them on the other side of this interlude, and they don’t have to discuss it to know they should make it last as long as possible. Steve waits until they’re both slick and ready, until Thor is writhing, until he himself is on the edge of falling apart, before he enters Thor in one long, sure thrust. When he moves to repeat the action, Thor, whose massive thighs are pinning him to the bed, splays a hand against his chest. Steve falls back and Thor smiles down at him, gorgeous and alive with mischief, and Steve thinks, _oh fuck_. They only pause like that for one searing instant, caught between the desire to stretch it into eternity and the urgent need to press forward into the future, but it’s an instant to treasure: all sensation and no thought, just the contact of their skin and the slick, hot clench of Thor’s body around his.

When Thor finally lets him move again, an involuntary shiver of relief runs through him. Steve rolls his hips up and Thor meets every thrust, and they go on like that in silent, perfect harmony until they can’t. Thor kisses him again at the end, and they cling to each other, grateful not to be alone.

They clean up and flop back into bed. Steve is still a little drunk, or maybe it’s an effect of the sex, but he feels warm and loose and sated. His head is pleasantly empty. Thor wraps around him, pressing his face into the back of Steve’s neck, his arms encircling Steve’s waist, and they fall asleep without a word.

Hours later, Steve surfaces into consciousness to discover himself snugly fitted between Thor at his back and Natasha at his front. It’s dark in the room, and no light peeks through the blinds. Still the middle of the night. Natasha has all her clothes on, and her eyes flick instantly open when Steve’s breathing changes. Embarrassment shoots through him—he and Thor had sex while she was asleep at the other end of the bed, for fuck’s sake—and he opens his mouth, but she stops him with a finger to his lips.

“Don’t you dare apologize. Don’t say anything,” she says. In her own way, Natasha is as much of a miracle as Thor. She doesn’t kiss him— _but if she did, I’d try not fuck it up_ , he mentally promises Bucky—but she picks his arm up and lays it over herself. He gets the message and pulls her close. Surviving this is going to require taking comfort where they can find it. He kisses the top of her head and lies still enough to experience the rare intimacy of watching Natasha Romanov drift off to sleep.

She looks sweeter than she ever has while awake, and Steve is horribly, selfishly glad that Natasha’s still here. He’s come to depend on her in ways he can’t explain. He has some stupid leadership role in their strange amalgam of gods and robots and mutants, but she’s the real heart of the team, this human woman who never gives anything away. She’s not a damn thing like Peggy, except for how if Steve thinks about her for more than a second, he gets choked with admiration in a way she’d never let him live down. Natasha is the toughest thing alive. She never needed a serum or a suit or a hammer to take on the universe.

Natasha’s going to get up tomorrow, having gotten plastered on highly advanced Wakandan booze with a super soldier and a god, and she’s not going to complain about her hangover. She’s going to ask him what the plan is. And if Steve doesn’t have an answer, she’ll tell him that they’re gonna kill Thanos or die trying, and he’ll have to agree.

Behind him, Thor stirs.

“I’d say there’s nothing left to lose, but if the past few days have taught me anything, it’s that there’s always something left to lose,” Thor says softly over his shoulder. “But I told Thanos he’d die for killing Heimdall, and I don’t intend to die an oathbreaker.”

Steve nods. “Then we do what we always do. We fight.”


End file.
